The Seasons Hereafter (31 page)

My kids
. A new silence surrounded them for the rest of the way.

At the wharf Owen joined the engineer and a truck driver in loading bundles of trap stock into the hold. The captain and the man from the bottled-gas company were rolling a dozen hundred-pound cylinders across the deck. A couple of boys were trundling cases of canned goods and crates of vegetables down the slip. Gulls squawked and wheeled over the glistening roofs of the seafood factory opposite. A faint cloud-layer was beginning to dull the early morning gold of the sun.

Vanessa didn't sit with the other passengers on the bench, but leaned against the cabin on the side facing out across the harbor, and smoked. Once she heard Owen laugh and felt her face tighten as if it were hardening clay. Tears were squeezed into her eyes. Withdrawal symptoms—she tried to ridicule herself. But she knew that if he came around the pilot house in this instant she would not be able to hide this awful defenselessness, no matter who else saw. She tried to summon up a vision of Jessup's Island, herself and Owen walking over the rocks, but she could not evoke it and in a moment of terror she thought a section of her memory had given way, like a piece of land weakened by surf. She stood rigid against the pilot house with her eyes shut.

Someone drawled at her elbow, “Well, I'd say that was some real old jumbo economy size hangover. You want something for it?”

She stared blurrily and at first without recognition into the small grotesque mask with the Egyptian eyes under a dense black fringe. The fringe was new.

“Hello, Gina,” Van said. The spinning slowed. “No, it's not a hangover. Are you going out to the island?”

“Yah.” Gina slumped against the side of the pilot house. “Back to Alcatraz. I've got no choice because I've got no money, and neither has Wandering Willy. He's down forrard, trying to sleep. . . .” She gave Van a sly sidewise grin. “I suppose you heard I took all his money when I skipped. I should've got on the first bus for New York or Miami, even.” She stared out at the harbor and after a moment said, “I wouldn't be here now. I'd never be here again.” There was a tremble in her voice. “But no, damn fool, I had to go on one big kick. Willy's been chasing me around trying to get me to come home.
Home
.” She lifted one shoulder in contempt. “I was onto something good. A guy off one of their trawlers.” She nodded her head toward Universal Seafoods. “Money to burn when he come ashore, and no woman. When he was like that I could a talked him into anything.” Her eyes became liquidly bright, she gave Van an eager excited smile that was incongruously childish through the make-up. “He always wanted to get on one of them tuna boats out on the West Coast, so I was working on him about that. California, you know, Hollywood and all that.
Disneyland
.” She said it in a hushed tone. “Jeest, I could just see me, out in all that sunshine. And I look real good in a bikini,” she added complacently. “You have to be skinny. Some men like skinny girls. I dunno if it makes them think of boys or not.” She giggled. “Got a spare cigarette on you?”

Van handed her a package. At least this ghastly visitation was giving her a chance to come to her senses. Gina lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, then blew smoke through her nostrils. The boat was backing away from the wharf and a damp breeze was beginning to blow. The harbor wrinkled under a silvery diffusion of sunlight. “Yep, I had something going for me,” Gina said regretfully. “He was just crazy for it. Then Willy ran us down in Chuck's room at the Avalon. My God, I never knew him to be so savage! A wild man! He was pounding on the door and yelling, and we was—well, you know—” She leered coyly at Van. “So we didn't answer, but he knew we were there, all right. He'd been listening. So he kicked in the door, and by then the man who runs the Avalon was up there, and I dunno who else, and there
I
was, bollicky bare-arse.” She giggled. “My, their eyes popped! And Chuck was trying to get into his pants and Willy was yelling he'd murder him. You'd think he had three pair of arms the way they were swinging around there.” Her voice had never sounded so alive. “Some nut called the police, so we all ended up in the police station. I had my clothes on by then, but that fresh cop, Wallace Winslow, wouldn't give me a chance to put my makeup on.”

“You must have felt naked,” said Vanessa.

Gina said suspiciously, “Huh? Well, anyway, we spent the night in jail, and poor Willy he like to heaved up his whole insides he was so upset. The sheriff had to call in a doctor for him. And Chuck, he's moaning for fear he'll lose his next trip out. I was the only one who looked half alive the next morning when the three of us were rampsed into court. Honest to Gawd, I thought I'd die laughing at the sight of them two.”

The bow had begun to dip into deepening swells and spray splashed over the rail. Under a dimming sun the water took on the dull gleam of pewter. Van leaned her shoulder against the wall and gazed ahead past Gina, who said resentfully, “And they never even spoke to
me
. Jeest, I warn't the one who made the mess, it was that Willy. . . . Anyway, we got our choice of fine or jail. Well, Chuck paid his and walked out without a blink at me, and Willy didn't have a cent on him. So the goddam numbnuts told the judge he could still have his job out
there
”—she twisted her mouth—“if he got right back to it, but he'd lose it if he went to jail. Stammered and swallowed and blinked away, and the judge said all right, but we had to be out of Limerock
today
and can't show up again with-out reporting to the goddam probation officer. And you should of heard him read
me
the Riot Act!” she said indignantly. “You'd think I was some old two-bit whore or something. And then ship me off out here at the end of it.”

“Would you rather have gone to jail?” Van asked.

“Damn right, and get it over with. Then I'd get my bus fare somehow and I'd be gone.” She looked into Van's face and said belligerently, “I'm going anyway, soon's I can get some cash together. Wouldn't you, if you was me?”

“If I were you,” said Van, “that's exactly what I'd do.” You little imbecile, she thought dispassionately. In six months you'll be strangled by one of your pick-ups who won't be an honest draggerman everybody in town knows, or you'll be half-dead from liquor or drugs or syphilis. You've got neither brain nor imagination, just a colossal conceit that would let you walk right into a sewer and think you smelled roses.

“You know what?” Gina said innocently. “You look as if you didn't want much to go back either. And I always thought you liked it.”

“That's not what I was thinking.” She was bored and tired, she felt as if the monotonous drawl had been going on forever. She straightened up to walk away. Owen and the engineer were spreading a tarpaulin over some bags of cement piled on the forward hatch. If she went near, she and Owen might catch each other's eye, even have a few innocent words. But some impulse or compulsion niggled at her. She tried to ignore it, but said at last, reluctantly, “I said if I were you that's what I do. That's if I really were you, Gina, with your way of thinking. But being me, I'd always want to be sure there was an escape hatch.”

“Meaning?” The girl screwed her face up into a grimace of suspicion. I don't know why I bother to say it, Van thought, she'd be no loss to the world, only to Willy, and he's nothing either.

“Meaning your bus fare home, kept in a safe place. Meaning some kind of a job. Meaning a little common sense about the people you drink with.” She shrugged and walked between Gina and the railing. “Oh, forget it,” she said. “You've probably got more sense than I credit you with.”

“Well, that's a hell of a thing to say!” Gina bawled after her. Van didn't look back. Up forward the men had secured the tarpaulin and had disappeared, probably into the fo'c'sle where they would attempt to cheer up Willy. The
Ella Vye
was heading out now between the breakwater and Owl's Head. Ahead lay some twenty wet miles with a freshening easterly wind and deepening seas. Dry lobster crates had been stacked along one rail. She moved one so she could sit with her back against the pilot house and her feet braced against the rail. She turned up her raincoat collar, tied her scarf around her head, pushed her hands deep into her sleeves, and sank back into herself for the hours ahead.

O
wen emerged from the fo'c'sle at Brigport and went ashore. He hadn't come back by the time the Brigport freight was unloaded, and a Brigport man shouted to Link that he'd gone home with one of his brothers. She knew then that she had been hoping he'd have something to say between Brigport and Bennett's. She felt no anger, only a dull loneliness.

As the boat rolled down in the erratic tide-rip off Tenpound, Willy emerged from the forward companionway, bleached and blinking, and stared vacantly around him, his mouth open. When he saw Vanessa he reacted slowly, then gave her an uncertain smile. He began jumbling through his pockets and she held out her cigarettes. He blushed and said, “Thanks. I guess I came without any.” As he handed them back she saw that his jacket sleeves were too short, and there was something unexpectedly moving and childish about the bony wrist; she was irritated by her reaction and said, “Did you have a good time on your vacation ashore?”

“Sure did,” he answered. “Finest kind. But I'm glad to be getting back to work. Running out of money for one thing.” His laugh died at birth. He inhaled hard and stared at the water heaving and hissing past the rail. She could see his Adam's apple working. Suddenly he turned his head toward her and said rapidly, “Gina's glad to be getting back too. It did her good to be ashore for awhile, that's why I told her to go ahead. She's too young not to have fun going to movies and like that. She's so young, you know what she gets a kick out of? Having a cup of coffee and a hamburger after the second show and watching the people come and go. Would you believe it?” He didn't wait. “That's the way she is. But she's had enough to do her for awhile. We had one john-rogers bang-up weekend, movies and bowling, and pizzas till they come out of our ears, and yesterday I borrowed a feller's car and we drove to Portland. She likes to go round in them big stores up there. Got herself a new pair of them skin-tight pants she looks so good in, and a blouse thing, looks like leopard skin.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Van said.

“It is,” he assured her. “She looks like a movie star in it.” Suddenly he lost himself in a long blind stare at Long Cove. The whistle sounded and he went down toward the stern without a glance at Vanessa, who no longer existed for him.

There was no sign of Owen at the wharf, no men at all in fact except Mark; everyone else was out, and school was in session, so that only women and small children met the boat. Having felt so far from the island in all respects, she was surprised to be welcomed with enthusiasm. They liked her, but why? She refused with thanks three invitations to come in and warm up with a cup of coffee, answered numerous inquiries about her tooth, and said she hadn't gotten to the movies. Kathy was excited to see her, saying that it felt like years since Saturday, but Van had a chance to go home alone because the mail wasn't out yet. When she left the wharf they were all greeting Gina with a kind of determined enthusiasm.

Barry hadn't washed dishes all weekend, but she made coffee for herself. For a long time she sat at the kitchen table looking at nothing, hardly thinking. Orientation was the hardest thing. Back to playing neighbor again, and wife, and she'd forgotten the lines and would probably go dumb at the first crisis. She could not even see herself attempting it; the fact that she'd been doing it very well for some time now meant, nothing. Any minute Kathy would be bounding in at the door with glad cries, and she would not be able to think how to look or respond. This got her up out of the chair and she went hastily upstairs. She drew the shades and pulled off her clothes and went to bed. Instantly she felt calmer in this pale dusk, with the soft shush of the wind blowing past the screen, and the sounds of birds and engines unseen taking on the strange, almost mystic significance given them by distance and invisibility. She began to feel weightless; on the edge of consciousness she drifted to the room where she had lived with Owen. She remembered how they had slept together, touching in some way all night long, and how often she had waked in joyful awareness to be sure he was there—to listen to his breathing, to smell his flesh, to make out his profile in the very first light, to be warmed through by the heat of his body as if she had never in her life been warm before.

Then the room became transferred to the old house on the island with such validity that she knew if she opened her eyes she would see the steep-pitched roof over her, and the bare beams dark with their age, the shreds of ancient bark still clinging. In a gale the house put together with wooden pegs would creak like a ship at sea. The thought filled her with a kind of ecstasy. Tears ran out of the sides of her eyes from under her lids, trickling toward her ears. They were entirely appropriate. A few times in her life she had cried from grief or anger, never from happiness. But then it had been always the life of somebody else. The Day had turned out to be a birth.

When she woke up, the boats were starting to come in. She washed and dressed, and unpacked the presents. She left Barry's on the kitchen table and went next door to give the Campion children theirs. Kathy was almost as rapturous over the surprise as they were. Terence, just in, gave her a slow smile and said, “It was real good of you to think of them.” She couldn't help being pleased by their pleasure in the small inexpensive things, and she kept sardonically ridiculing herself for falling into the trap of sentimentality. And worse, she thought. You'll be getting to like the sound of thanks. Next thing you'll be keeping a cookie jar full for all the little paws.